Alex Nichol | Web & UX (User Experience) Designer | Newcastle upon Tyne

 
Okay, so it needs some refining, but Russian company Displair has come up with an exciting new technology that projects images on to a stream of cold fog, and uses an infra-red camera to track hand gestures. Having boot-strapped this prototype together with minimal government funding, I image it’s only a matter of time before they get some serious funding together!

Read the full story at TechCrunch…

Okay, so this has nothing to do with design or UX, but a bunch of us at Riff Raff took part in the Great North Run yesterday, raising money for Finchale Training College, a nice group of people who help adults with disabilities to get back into employment. We’ve all been training for around 4 months now, and it has been quite an adventure.

In the run up to the event, I was a little anxious and eager to find out what to expect. Googling the subject unearthed precious few helpful accounts of what I was letting myself in for, so I thought it might be helpful to write about my somewhat bizarre experiences here. Hopefully it will prove useful to anyone about to run their first half marathon…

It seems that the humble mobile app is gaining traction in the offline world, as American home improvement chain Lowe’s have announced plans to replace their checkout scanners with some 42,000 iPhones, according to Mobile Commerce Daily.

The idea behind the radical switch is to enable Lowe’s staff to provide a better service to their customers, through on-the-spot inventory checks, access to helpful information and how-to videos, and eventually handling credit card transactions.

This is a bold move, and an exciting one too, as it exploits mobile for its greatest strength – mobility – rather than just another way to reach an audience.

With companies liked Square enabling anyone to take credit card payments via iOS devices, it’ll be great to see smaller retailers making this technology work to their advantage soon.

Exciting times are ahead for those of us with an interest in the emergence of truly ubiquitous IPTV services, as Google announced to the Android development community this week that, with the upcoming OS update to Honeycomb, Google TV devices will finally be Android compatible.…

There are lots of popular design myths passed off as ‘best practice’ these days by armchair designers, particularly within the web design industry. Somehow these guidelines manage to work their way into the public consciousness, often taking root in briefing and specification documents where they eventually become criteria used to measure the quality of a delivered product…

Last week I wrote an article for the Tech Notes column in The Journal giving one tiny example of how marketers can unite their online and offline activities to create a single seamless user experience.

This is a fascinating topic for me, and something that keeps me up at night scribbling in my Moleskine, so it was great to share a couple of ideas…

I was reading a blog post recently by a member of our Riff Raff UI design and development team, Richard Powell, and thought I’d share a story that I felt was quite appropriate.

It’s a story that helps us to understand how human beings make decisions, and how important it is to cater for both the emotional and the logical side of any customer experience…

No successful web project ever started out with a list of KPI’s and conversion targets. It’s the creative vision that sparks a project into life and drives it to fruition.

But it’s all too easy to let our enthusiasm for the genius idea get the better of us, and quickly find ourselves saddled with an expensive collection of digital tumbleweed. But there is a better way…

A conversation I had at studio Riff Raff the other day got me thinking about why I started up in business for myself. It seems so long ago now (almost 13 years in fact) that I could barely recall.

I felt sure it was something to do with freedom and the ability to take holidays whenever I pleased, but when I really thought about it, the answer was actually quite surprising…

Okay, I take it back – earlier this year I moved my blog to Tumblr because I found the feature-bloat in WordPress a bit of a ball-ache. Tumblr’s lightweight feature-set is great for quick, impulsive post-writing, which actually encouraged me to write more

But user experience is not everything. Performance and delivery has to count for something, and their constant server problems meant that my site was down more than it was up. I lost numerous posts to server failures and who knows how much traffic over the months, so I’ve switched my blog back to WordPress.

It may have a wealth of features I’ll never get around to using, but at least I can take responsibility for reliable hosting myself, and never have to see that “We’re Sorry” page again!

Good riddance Tumblr – it was fun while it lasted!

When it comes to social marketing, it seems that small businesses in the UK just don’t get it. Despite all the buzz surrounding Facebook and Twitter, many SME’s are struggling to see any real value in their inclusion in the marketing mix. So is social marketing really just a box of nail-holes, or are UK businesses just doing it wrong?

I’ve often fantasised about having an Undo button for life in general, but recently I’ve found myself imagining what life would be like with a search engine, too…

The Risky Business conference, hosted by Great Ormond Street Hospital, addresses issues of risk management, leadership and teamwork in high-risk industries, such as medical, chemical, defence and emergency services. Visitors can now register to watch live talks by the likes of NASA, RAF and the CAA as they happen…

Three of Riff Raff’s recent web projects have been shortlisted for regional design awards The SMACS, organised by digital media collective Super Mondays…

Mix Online Labs has released a free cross-platform plugin to export vector and bitmap images from Adobe Illustrator to HTML5′s Canvas element, including support for interactivity and animation…

If it were not incredible enough that companies like BP and LastMinute.com can register a colour as a Trademark, it now appears that interactivity itself has been patented…

At Riff Raff, we’re looking to hire an experienced PHP web developer, and we’ve noticed a pattern emerging amongst this latest generation of developers in our region that we find quite concerning; Very few of them seem to have the capability to build anything from scratch…

Seeing the new GAP logo, kindly pointed out to me by one of our lead developers this morning, makes me wonder if Riff Raff are in the wrong business. Brand design is clearly a market with more budget than sense!

I’m not sure if this was a tragic case of design-by-committee or some kind of visionary enigma that only the branding elite could possibly appreciate, but I imagine that someone was duped into paying a vast sum of money for what can only be described as 1990′s Clipart!

One of our Riff Raff UI Developers, @byrichardpowell introduced me to rumpetroll.com this morning; An engaging and extremely unusual web chat experience created entirely with HTML5, Javascript and CSS3…

This has been around for a while now, but I love this classic TED talk by Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman, where he explains how a bad ending can destroy the memory of an otherwise beautiful experience…